Personal constructs of nursing practice : a comparative analysis of three groups of Australian nurses.

Repertory grid technique was used to compare the personal constructs that three groups of nurses (critical care nurses, gerontology nurses and general nurses) used to characterize effective nursing within their areas of practice.

To seek differences in the distribution of constructs across the three groups, the repertory grid data were represented by non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) which revealed separation between the critical care nurses and the gerontology nurses with the general nurse distributed between the former.

The significance of differences in relative frequencies of personal constructs apparent in the scaling solution was tested and, in some cases, found to be statistically significant.